<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>In an Unripe Season by ineedsomecyanide</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26813110">In an Unripe Season</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineedsomecyanide/pseuds/ineedsomecyanide'>ineedsomecyanide</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Les Misérables - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Fever Dreams, M/M, shapeshifter hunters</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 09:14:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,313</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26813110</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineedsomecyanide/pseuds/ineedsomecyanide</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Where are you going, hunter?</i><br/><i>Are you looking for trouble, or are you looking for love?</i><br/><i>Hunter, where are you going?</i><br/><i>If you die, you’ll know.</i> </p><p>Javert is a shapeshifter hunter trying to catch a white-haired, golden-antlered shapeshifter, who is as evanescent as his dreams...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Javert/Jean Valjean</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Sewerchat Anniversary Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>In an Unripe Season</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catallii/gifts">Catallii</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For Cat, who asked “old god Valjean with deer horns” as an art prompt, and got fic instead. I hope you enjoy it nevertheless!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div>
  <p>Thirst burned in his throat, and his limbs were wary. Javert couldn’t remember how many days (months? Years? Mere hours?) he had been trudging in the woods, looking for a white deer.</p>
  <p>They called them shapeshifters. He had seen the white deer in chains, as a young man, he had helped the hunters drag him in the village square, bound and wounded, when he was just a humble adjutant.</p>
  <p>Blood glistened on the deer’s impossibly white coat, and Javert had almost thrown up, swayed by both the stench of blood and the magnificent dignity the animal still possessed.</p>
  <p>But he remained strong and still at his place, and a few years later he had become a hunter.</p>
  <p>The shapeshifters were ancient beings, who had walked the Earth before humans did, and their animal parts were said to cure the ill and bless those who believed in them.</p>
  <p>Some isolated villages still feared and respected the old gods, but most of the people now feared them in a darker and more anxious way, that caused them to capture and kill and maim.</p>
  <p>The hunters were lowly beings, on a par with the executioners, always bloody, half-wild from spending too much time in the most remote parts of the land, and not enough time with their own kind. Rumours said that they were almost shapeshifters themselves, and that one day they would have been the ones to be dismembered for their thaumaturgic body parts.</p>
  <p>In the end, the white deer had escaped and Javert had almost gone mad. When the high fevers had broken, he had sworn to find him again.</p>
  <p>Javert had seen the deer in his human form one night, when it was his turn to watch over the shapeshifters' cells. His hair was sand-coloured and curly, and the criss-crossed wounds on his back shone when the moonlight hit them. His eyes in particular etched themselves into Javert’s soul: golden, sad, too human for a not shapeshifting deer, but with something wild in them, that made them look out of place in his too human, kind face.</p>
</div>
<p></p><div>
  <p>❧</p>
</div><p>
  <i>In his dreams, he kisses the scars left by those wounds, cardes his fingers in his curls, draws blood form his lips.</i>
</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>❧</p>
</div><p>When he had come to his senses again, he had almost immediately left for the woods in which the deer had been caught. He had spent weeks there, without finding him anywhere, and when he returned, he never uttered a word about the deer again. But he was like a woodworm eating at his brain.</p><p>So, when rumours of an old, white and scarred deer started circulating among the shapeshifter hunters, Javert did everything but run to that impenetrable forest.</p><p>The people from the nearest village told stories about an antlered devil who buried a treasure in the woods; whoever tried to find it, would have died in a week, or a month, depending on who you asked.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>❧</p>
</div>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
    <i>In his dreams, he covers the deer with his body. The arrows of the other hunters pierce his clothes and his skin, and the deer can feel his pain, and he can feel his, and they are one and whole.</i>
  </p>
</div>
<p></p><div>
  <p>❧</p>
</div>
<p></p><div><p>Now he had lost the sense of time and orientation, and he had finished his water and food long ago.</p><p>He had slept wrapped in his horse blanket – but no horse, the trees were too thick, and his horse would have only slowed him – and he was slowly making his way towards a meadow.</p>
<p></p><div><p>❧</p></div>
<p></p><div><p><i>In his dreams, the shapeshifter is in his human form. He grins and his body is pliant underneath Javert’s own. Javert is scowling, but soon the other man – god? Demon? – will put his lips on Javert’s, and their bodies will move as one, and they will be only flesh and breath and he will forget himself and everything’s he’s ever been.</i></p></div>
<p></p><div><p>❧</p></div>
<p></p><div><p>Dew seeped through Javert’s clothes, his boots, and rested on his hair; its chill reached his bones. The morning mist covered everything, from the trees to the tender grass beneath Javert’s feet. The sun rising on the clearing left him aghast – he had not seen the sunlight that clearly in days, only through the thick foliage. The pale light tinged everything in white, and a single dark shape stood out against the rosy hue of the horizon.<br/>
Branch-like antlers stretched towards the sky, and white fur and pale scars glittered underneath the sun, looking almost silvery.</p><p>It was <i>him</i>! <i>His</i> shapeshifter! Javert was sure. Or he wasn’t. His mind was as tired as his body, and a feeble voice in his head suggested that maybe it was all in his head, too tired and thirsty and hungry, with the promise of the hunt as the only frayed threat that connected him to reality.<br/>
But the sighting instilled new life in his body, and his feet almost moved by their own accord, bringing him closer and closer to the white deer.<br/>
For a brief moment their eyes locked: tired grey irises bore into ones that looked like they were made of liquid gold, a little bit too beastly, a little bit too human. <i>I know what you are</i>, they said, <i>I know who you are. I’ll run and you’ll run after me, and our dance will never end, and we will never know for sure who is hunting who.</i><br/>
Then the deer sprinted away, abruptly, and Javert after him, with renewed zeal. He felt elated, almost like a child, the hunt had become a game, he didn’t think of the blood and the violence anymore. What mattered now was his prey – he almost did not want to catch him, because then all the thrill of the chase would end, and Javert would feel tired and wary and disillusioned again. He tried to get close, but not too close, always leaving room for his prey to escape, but not to go too far from him. 
He could have continued like that forever, he thought, now that the delight of the hunt sustained him.<br/>
He did not feel the thorns tearing at his cloak, or the branches scratching his face, as the deer brought him deeper and deeper into the forest.</p>
<p></p><div><p>❧</p></div>
<p></p><div><p><i>Where are you going, hunter?</i><br/>
<i>Are you looking for trouble, or are you looking for love?</i><br/>
<i>Hunter, where are you going?</i><br/>
<i>If you die, you’ll know.</i></p></div><div><p><i>In his dreams, the rhyme children sung around hunters suddenly makes sense.</i></p></div>
<p></p><div><p>❧</p></div><p>Then, suddenly, the deer stopped. He had gracefully jumped past a river that cut the forest in two. Javert was so focused on the deer that had first he had not noticed it, but now he could clearly hear the water roaring. The deer was looking at him; he probably felt safe now, with a massive body of water between them. A ray of sunlight that had found its way through the leaves struck him, and Javert saw his human form: he had gotten older, his hair was now as white as his deer fur, the lines on his face and on his body were deeper, the scars had healed, but he was certainly him – Javert could have recognized those powerful shoulders and too-kind eyes everywhere. He would have followed him to the end of the world.<br/>
Transfixed, he took a step towards the man (a man who would have looked like any other man, if not for the almost golden antlers on his head – there is always something uncanny and otherworldly about shapeshifters), to do what? Reach out to him, catch him? But now it didn’t matter anymore, because his feet had slipped (on some wet moss? Was it his own clumsiness, or the shapeshifter’s powers?) and he had fallen into the water.</p><p>The last thing he saw were glittering golden antlers, and then nothing more.</p></div>
<p></p><div><p>❧</p></div>
<p></p><div><p><i>In his dreams, he sheds his hunter skin, and follows a man-deer in the depth of the woods.</i></p></div></div>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>